Right Arm! [Finished]

[Dark]

It was good to be home; for the first time in months, Hadyn felt comfortable with his surroundings. The air smelled right--nothing like smog--it sounded right--the din of too many people in too little space--it felt right. He would have been completely content if he hadn't realized several things all at once. One, he didn't have an apartment anymore; two, he didn't have enough money to rent a room at this point; and three, he wasn't going to let his family see him like this. Not yet, at least. He needed time to--adjust.

Which, unfortunately, left his living arrangements rather uncertain for the foreseeable future .

He wasn't sure what made him think of Ezra, but he was the closest thing he had to a friend--which was rather sad in retrospect--and if he lived in the same apartment--chancy, but worth a shot--it would be nice to see a familiar face.

He took a deep breath and knocked.

[Bee]

Ezra had been writing a sheet of music for the first time in months when there came a knock at the door. He stopped what he was doing and stared curiously in the direction of the sound. No one came to the apartment, ever. He wondered who it could possibly be. He didn't owe anyone money. No former fans knew his address.

He headed to the door as quickly as he could. Senka was down for her afternoon nap, so he was going to need to keep whoever it was from making more noise.

He opened it, and stared blankly for several moments at his visitor. He looked largely the same as he always had, except that he was missing a limb, and perhaps looked several years older than he logically could've been. Still ridiculously bright, though. Somewhere in him bubbled a feeling of pleasantness--he was happy to see him.

"Freakshow," he said, and sounded moderately surprised. Hadyn had accomplished quite a feat with that one.

[Dark]

Relief that he wouldn't admit to flooded his system, and Hadyn smiled faintly at the utterance of the ridiculous nickname the man had given him--ages ago, it seemed. Ezra even looked vaguely pleased to see him, and Hadyn was glad for it.

"Ezmeralda," he greeted, "How have you been?"

Hadyn couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Ezra--probably shortly before he'd realized he was pregnant and locked himself up in that wretched apartment--and he ached with the memory. He'd fucked up a lot of things.

But it had been a good two years, then, plus or minus a few odd months. A long time to stay out of touch, and though Ezra didn't seem like the type to hold a grudge--too much energy involved and all--Hadyn still felt like a prick for disappearing without a word. But then, what could he have said?

[Bee]

Ezra shrugged. He never had anything interesting to say to that question. Mostly he felt the same no matter what he was doing, and he never did all that much. Brief sparks of ambition tempered immediately by complete disinterest. He didn't even feel bored with life. It was just sort of there. He waved at it. Life said hi. They both went about their ways.

"Decent," he said.

He stepped back from the door and made a vague motion forward, inviting the feline to come in. "Keep your voice down, though." Ezra never had a problem with that; his voice was permanently muffled and mumbled by the chain in his mouth. Occasionally he removed it for clarity. But he always felt unsettled, and back into his mouth it went. Torquehelm conditioning or genetics; probably a combination of both. What a wonderful realm, to instill in its children such a deeply ingrained sense of shame. "My niece is sleeping."

[Dark]

Hadyn took the invitation to enter, and trailing after Ezra responded quietly, "Niece? I didn't know you had a niece." It seemed like the sort of thing one should know about their friend; maybe not a casual acquaintance, but definitely a friend. Of course, he and Ezra had never really talked much about their families, and he had been gone for two years--plenty of time for Ezra's relatives to breed, he supposed. "I take it this is a new development?"

"I guess that's a wrench in the plans. This wasn't entirely a social visit--I wanted to see if I could maybe crash here for a couple days--but if your niece is visiting..." It could suck sleeping out in the cold, but he supposed he could always use the last of his money to try and hustle some pool or something. He might make enough to get a room somewhere.

[Bee]

"I've had her for a couple of years now," Ezra informed him. He was suddenly transfixed by Hadyn's tail, the Corvie tail, black with that particular shade of blue at the tip. "Sadly, her parents were not able to take care of her, and...I couldn't leave her out in the cold."

Both literally and figuratively. A graveyard. Such a dismal place to leave a child, like the mother knew what the near future would bring.

He glanced at the feline. "You are more than welcome to sleep here for a couple of days. Or however long you need. You'll need to provide your own groceries, though. We haven't enough to feed three."

There really wasn't enough to feed two, but Senka, at her age, wasn't exactly packing away the pounds, and Ezra himself ate pretty much the bare minimum required to keep his body running.

"If you don't mind me asking...what happened to your arm?"

[Dark]

Hadyn shifted, uncomfortable as Ezra spoke about his niece. Hadyn knew it was just a turn of phrase--"out in the cold"--but something about the way Ezra said it made him think about--no. At least the kid's parents didn't outright abandon her; giving her to Ezra had been a good move. He felt bile rise in his throat, and forcibly stopped thinking about it. Ezra had asked him a question.

"This?" he brandished the limb in question with a self-deprecating smile, "I decided to balance out my karma by pushing a guy out of the way of a lot of falling rubble and got caught up in it instead. It got infected." And the damn doctor sawed it off. End of story.

It hadn't been the most pleasant experience of his life, and being cooped up in a house with Jin hadn't helped anything, either. It was probably a good thing he'd moved on.

[Bee]

Ezra eyed the appendage with a touch of sadness. He was a little surprised to hear of him doing something so selfless as taking an injury for someone else; he didn't think Hadyn was at all a bad person, just a...selfish one, he supposed. Ezra didn't think he himself would take a blow for anyone (except his niece) out of pure apathy or perhaps cowardice. Everyone had their vices. He was a little proud of Hadyn.

"Sorry to hear that," he said. Every once in a blue moon, some member of his realm got it in his or her head to chop off the limb of a child as part of a "binding." It never ended well. It typically, in fact, ended in madness and death.

So odd sometimes, how the body ended up looking. He looked at Hadyn's horns.

"My niece has a mutation quite like yours," he said, conversationally. "Corvies do such strange things to their children."

[Dark]

Hadyn shrugged; he'd excepted what had happened, and was trying to move on with his life. It sucked, but what else could he do? The incident had shown him the follies of being the good guy; he wasn't likely to make that mistake again.

"A mutation like mine, eh?" Corvies did tend to have more cases of mutation than most realms--Hadyn had never particular connected with the realm, but his mother was a fine example--but he'd never really thought his mutation to be a common one. An interesting coincidence.

"I think it most cases it's not so much what they do to their children, but what they did to themselves, accident or otherwise. The kids just inherit it." He thought of his mother with a smile, "With the crazy shit my mom gets up to, I'm lucky I didn't end up with tentacles."

[Bee]

"Oh, it's a really remarkable similarity," he said. His brain was making connections he didn't necessarily want it to make. He did not want to believe, for example, that Hadyn would abandon a child in the middle of a graveyard. But everything fit so perfectly. A couple years gone for inexplicable reasons. The coloring. The horns. Something was up; he wasn't going to believe it was a coincidence.

He gave Hadyn what ended up being something of a pointed look. He wanted his suspicions confirmed, one way or another. He may or may not actually do anything about it, but he wanted to know. What if Senka asked one day, for example? He wanted to be able to tell her something.

"Would you like to come have a look at her? I'm very proud of her."

He gestured to the nursery. A little visit shouldn't wake her up.